Last edited by KermMartian on 22 Feb 2013 06:18:16 pm; edited 2 times in total

The new TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition isn't the first color-screen graphing calculator. It isn't even TI's first color graphing calculator, a distinction claimed by the TI-Nspire CX and its sibling the TI-Nspire CX CAS. However, the TI-84+CSE, as we're abbreviating it, is a major milestone in the 17-year-old TI-83 and TI-84 Plus family of calculators. Although it retains the look and feel of the TI-84 Plus operating system, and keeps the familiar case shape and key layout, the outstanding feature of the TI-84+CSE is a bright, glossy color LCD screen. No longer will math and programs need to squeeze into 96 by 64 monochrome pixels; the new screen is 320x240 and can display 65,000 different colors. Starting in November 2012, Cemetech first discovered and received official and unofficial updates about the new calculator. We've seen a seminar showcasing the math features and gotten the official PR information. Now, we're proud to announce the first full, formal hands-on review of the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition.

Our TI contacts sent yours truly, Cemetech administrator Christopher Mitchell, a preview calculator, the very device pictured above. I have spent hours engrossed in trying out its many new math and programming features, and my first impressions as a fourteen-year user of TI's graphing calculators is overwhelmingly positive. In this complete review, I'll show you the new math features, as well as the existing features that have been augmented with the color and higher resolution the new LCD affords. Since my real passion for TI calculators lies in programming, I'll also show you the new features for TI-BASIC programmers, and discuss some of the new discoveries that assembly programmers need to know. Finally, I'll do a quick teardown of the device, so that you can see what makes it tick. In a phrase, the new TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition is sleek, colorful, and takes good advantage of its new hardware, marred only by slight (easily-fixed) sluggishness.

Physical Features
The TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition has the same case and keyboard as its predecessor, the TI-84 Plus Silver Edition. It has a serial I/O port and a miniUSB jack at the top of the case, the LCD taking the upper one-third of the front, and the keyboard occupying the remainder. Like the TI-84 Plus Silver Edition, it has interchangeable faceplates, although I suspect many students will choose to keep the glossy black faceplate included with the calculator. The largest changes are the new color LCD and a rechargeable Li-Ion battery replacing the old AAA battery compartment. It has a few smaller changes: a charging LED on the top of the right side of the device, used to indicate whether the device is charging or charged, and two contacts on the lower sides of the devices for charging in a cradle. The calculator ships with the miniUSB cable and calculator-to-calculator USB cable that all TI-84 Plus calculators have included, but my review calculator also included a wall-to-USB power adapter for computer-free charging. TI claims that the battery is good for about a week of in-class use or 2 weeks of homework, and my unit seemed to last around 8-10 hours of use on a charge (in a very unscientific test).

Turn the calculator on, and you're confronted with a new but familiar-looking view. While you still have a homescreen for doing math and calculations, a new bar is present at the top of the LCD displaying the calculator's current modes as well as a battery meter. No matter where you go in the OS, that status bar follows you around. A quick trip around the menus would soon show you that almost everything is where you'd expect from using a TI-84 Plus Silver Edition. You can still do math, statistics, graphing, and programming. You can still work with lists and matrices and tables of graph coordinates, albeit on a larger screen. While the older calculator models could all show 8 rows and 16 columns of normal-sized text at once, the TI-84+CSE fits 10 rows and 26 columns of text. Let's go deeper into what you can do with all this space with a look at the math features.

Math Features
The TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition, for all its fanciness, must at heart be an effective tool for math. To evaluate whether it succeeds, we must look at a few factors. First, will the legions of students and teachers accustomed to learning with the TI-83 Plus and TI-84 Plus be able to adapt to this device? Second, will users who pick up the calculator for the first time find it easy to use? Finally, does it keep all of the features that made the TI-83 Plus and TI-84 Plus overwhelming successes while effectively exploiting its color screen to make math even more understandable? In this reviewer's opinion, the answer to all three is a resounding yes. That enthusiasm would be slightly qualified if you look at the calculator as more than a pure math tool, but we'll get to that later.

Arithmetic and Algebra: For the first question, the interface will undoubtedly be comfortable for students and teachers comfortable with TI's other TI-83 Plus and TI-84 Plus calculators. Although menus hold more text and the graphing features have been overhauled, for the most part everything works the same. The calculator has a MathPrint operating system, which means that as on the recent TI-84 Plus and TI-84 Plus Silver Edition calculators, radicals, exponents, functions, and fractions look a lot like what you'd expect to see in a math book. The left side of Figure 1 shows some calculations on the homescreen with the new higher-resolution MathPrint. Unfortunately, TI doesn't take advantage of the color screen to highlight matching parentheses (a feature found on the Casio Prizm), but that's a trivial complaint. The new calculator will be no more or less easy-to-use to new users than the existing models, which is to say relatively simple (for the simpler features). Some features, especially statistics, have been made even easier, as you'll see. How about effective use of the color LCD? Let's look at graphing to answer that.

Graphing: As you can see from the right side of Figure 1, graphing has gotten a lot fancier. Due to technical limitations (CPU speed and RAM), the graphscreen is 265 pixels wide and 165 pixels tall, with a thick border around the edges. Equations and statistics plots can now be graphed in any of 15 different colors, various line styles, and with even more shading options than the older calculators. Because we're no longer limited to black-and-white, it's now much more useful to put a grid of lines or points behind graphs so that you can easily figure out coordinates of points on a graph. Therefore, the three new grid options are GridOff, GridLine, and GridDot. You can set the grid color, the axes color, and the color of the border. Perhaps the most novel feature is the ability to put a photograph ("Image") behind the graph, although since we do not yet know the Image format we were unable to test this feature. There's a feature to detect asymptotes, which will make tangent graphs (for one) much more understandable. Overall, the graphing feels much more powerful than on previous models, and isn't appreciably slower (nor faster).

Figure 2: Shaded graphs (left) and some polar spirographs (right)

Statistics: All of the new Stats Wizards from the MathPrint operating systems are present on the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition, in more or less the same form as on the previous black-and-white TI-84 Plus calculators. There is, however, a new mode called QuickPlot&Fit-EQ. If you choose this option from the Calc tab of the Stat menu, you'll be taken to the graphscreen, where you can move the cursor around and create a series of points to represent a scatter plot. As with other drawing modes, there's a Style menu accessed via [F5] ([Graph]) to control the color of the points you drop. When you place at least two points, the Style menu changes to a FitEQ menu: select it, and you'll get a list of the types of equations you can fit to the points you placed. The calculator will find the line of best fit, draw it, and show the equation for the resulting graph. This new mode will greatly simplify the task of fitting lines to sets of points, which previously took three tedious steps.

Drawing: The Draw menu ([2nd][PRGM]) has a new Background tab, but the real difference comes when you go to draw on the graphscreen. Invoking any of the drawing functions like Line, Pt-On, Circle, or Text will take you to the graphscreen, display a cursor, and place the aforementioned Style menu in the lower-righthand corner. From the menu, you can change line color and thickness, text color, and point color and style. While the new Image feature is used for full-color photographs, you can use the old StorePic and RecallPic to save and recall 15-color snapshots of the graphscreen. Because each of the Pic variables is now 22KB, they can only be stored in archive, and are (understandably) slower to save and open.

Programming Features
Like the TI-84 Plus Silver Edition and friends, the new TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition can run TI-BASIC and z80 assembly programs.
TI-BASIC: I bet the programmers among us were as anxious as myself to know whether the existing TI-BASIC programming features were retained, and the answer is a resounding yes. In addition, TI-BASIC programs can access all of the new drawing function in their 15-color glory, from lines and text to points and pictures. Check out Figure 3 for an animated screenshot of different line thicknesses, text sizes and colors, and point styles. The right side of the same figure demonstrates that the Output( command can address every row and column of the new 10x26-character homescreen. We have already found a bug in the Menu( command, and unusual behavior with non-black Pt-On( commands, but we anticipate being able to work with TI to resolve these and any other issues we find.

z80 Assembly: For assembly programmers, all existing programs and Apps will have to be ported to the new calculator. Programs are placed at a new address, the AsmPrgm token has been replaced by an Asm84CPrgm token, and most bcall and safeRAM addresses have changed. The biggest difference is that because it is impossible to store a 150KB LC buffer in RAM, coders will have to re-think how they use the screen. We have been extensively discussing best practices for 84+CSE ASM programmers and porting existing apps like Doors CS here at Cemetech, and we hope the programmers among us will join the discussion.

Figure 3: All of the color, text, line, and point options for BASIC programmers (left) and making games on the larger homescreen (right). Also, the first known TI-84+CSE animated screenshot!

Hardware Teardown
No Cemetech review of a new calculator could be complete without a look into the hardware. If you look at the photograph below, you can see, from left to right, the slide case, the rechargeable battery with the case screws and the battery cover, the back cover, the antistatic shield covering the mainboard, the mainboard itself, the key membrane and keys, the black faceplate, and the front cover. Unfortunately, because the LCD is glued onto the other side of the mainboard, I was unable to detach it for fear of cracking the glass. The major features on the mainboard are a 4MB (32Mb) Macronix Flash chip, a custom TI z80 CPU/ASIC that exactly matches the one in the TI-84 Plus Silver Edition, the USB and I/O ports, and ancillary support components. The LCD driver, the ILI9325, is presumably a chip-on-glass device on the underside of the LCD. Hardware-wise, this is a very minimal departure from the TI-84 Plus, the only real differences being the battery, 4MB Flash chip, and color LCD. It turns out that all of the CPU/ASIC-specific features to support the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition were actually already present in the TI-84 Plus years ago, which explains several mysterious, unexplained, and unused features that were discovered back then. Although we will continue to research the ASIC and the LCD, we don't anticipate any big surprises.

Summary: The Big Picture
As I prefaced this review, the most important question I have to ask is whether the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition is an effective math tool. In a world where students are increasingly distracted by complex, flashy smartphones that are indistinguishable from tiny computers, and where TI's black-and-white calculators have been increasingly noted as antiquated, this is a huge step forward. From the perspective of a math student or teacher, this is a calculator that combines an easier-to-read, more expressive display that can show graphs and equations more easily with a familiar interface. All of the existing books and tutorials on the TI-83 Plus and TI-84 Plus apply to this new calculator, although it behooves new references (like my own TI-83+/TI-84+ math book coming soon) to explain and explore the new features like color graphing and Quickplot&FitEQ. The interface feels slightly sluggish, with some menus taking close to a full second to fully render, which hopefully won't discourage impatient students from using the device. From a programmer and enthusiast point of view, my reaction is more mixed. There's a prevalent opinion that something like a 25MHz ez80 CPU, a faster, more capable, and fully-compatible version of the processor in the new (and old) calculators, would have been a better choice. A CPU clocked at close to twice the speed would have helped reduce the lag in rendering complex menus and large images, and would have given programmers more options for creating quick, responsive programs. Nevertheless, I know that many ideas are already being tossed around to work with the capabilities that the new calculator does have, and I'm sure many among us will rise to the challenge.

At a rumored $129, the new calculator is around the same price-point as the TI-84 Plus Silver Edition, and about $10 more expensive than its color-screen competitor, the Casio Prizm. I think it's a good investment for any student looking to get a new graphing calculator, and not a bad choice for programmers to explore as well. The OS feels stable and remains full-featured, the slight LCD sluggishness can be excused for math, and we look forward to years of continued progress in the TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus family! For more specs, references, history, and information on the TI-84+CSE, please refer to our TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition reference page. Thanks to DrDnar, BrandonW, calc84maniac, critor, Tari, and all the other people who have contributed their brains to the technical exploration of critor's calculator.

I'm not familiar with MathPrint but those math functions look amazing, and the dotted line to separate the equations is useful; it would be awesome if the rows alternated color but there won't be that many equations on the screen to really loose track of which line you are looking across on.

I'm really looking forward to the adoption of this calculator and the standardization of any programming features and support. Have you tried reaching out to other shell makers, namely MOS & Ion, about the hardships they encountered while making their shell? Pin-pointing hardships is one way to make the transition easier; I'll post in the proper topic though.

I thoroughly enjoyed this exhaustive review of yours, Kerm!

There are two types of people in the world: those who can extrapolate data from incomplete data

Out of curiosity, does the new starting address provide a higher or lower amount of program space? Has anyone probed whether the $C000 execution limit is still enabled?

It is. Executing at $C000 causes the calculator to turn off; when you turn it back on, it RAM Clears.

comicIDIOT wrote:

I'm not familiar with MathPrint but those math functions look amazing, and the dotted line to separate the equations is useful; it would be awesome if the rows alternated color but there won't be that many equations on the screen to really loose track of which line you are looking across on.

Yeah, that would be pretty cool. We should suggest that feature.

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I'm really looking forward to the adoption of this calculator and the standardization of any programming features and support. Have you tried reaching out to other shell makers, namely MOS & Ion, about the hardships they encountered while making their shell? Pin-pointing hardships is one way to make the transition easier; I'll post in the proper topic though.

I don't believe the MirageOS and Ion writers will be creating ports for this calculator, but that's not a bad idea just to get ideas.

Does that animated screenshot runs at the exact same speed as the real calculator? If not, then how different is the speed from the calc?

The drawing commands seems kinda slow, according to the screenshot, but they definitively seems faster than the PRIZM.

As for the Pt-On bug, is it about all colors displaying as black until the program is stopped? If so, I hope that they fix it faster than Casio did. Casio PRIZM calcs had the exact same bug with the Locate/Output command and it took them over a year before finally fixing it >.<

Does that animated screenshot runs at the exact same speed as the real calculator? If not, then how different is the speed from the calc?

That screenshot is about 25% slower than a real calculator.

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The drawing commands seems kinda slow, according to the screenshot, but they definitively seems faster than the PRIZM.

Slower than the black-and-white drawing on the TI-83+/TI-84+, faster than the Prizm.

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As for the Pt-On bug, is it about all colors displaying as black until the program is stopped? If so, I hope that they fix it faster than Casio did. Casio PRIZM calcs had the exact same bug with the Locate/Output command and it took them over a year before finally fixing it >.<

Square and cross Pt-On(s don't get their colors until the program ends indeed; quite annoying. I am collecting a list of bugs to report; so far I have the Pt bug and the Menu( bug I discovered. I'll keep my eye out for other things community members find.

Anything else you want me to test, DJ_O, especially on the BASIC side of things?

Ok thanks. I will try in VirtualDub to see how it looks like at the real speed. Do you think the speed drop for drawing commands would be too brutal for decent looking game menus and stuff, such as in this screenshot, for example?

(That's pure 84+ BASIC, by the way)

Kerm could you try to run the following stuff?

1) Fill the entire 265x165 screen with Horizontal on both a TI-83+ and the color screen calculator. I wonder how long approximately does it take to fill

2) Does RecallPic and StorePic work inside programs with archived pics?

Of course you have to change the A values since text is larger, but I wonder how does that BASIC trick (as used in my screenshot above) behave on the 84+ C Silver Edition? And does it behave differently depending of what color you are using (knowing that white text has a gray background, for example)?

1) Fill the entire 265x165 screen with Horizontal on both a TI-83+ and the color screen calculator. I wonder how long approximately does it take to fill

This one is really painful on the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition. You can see the partial drawing of the horizontal lines, which I don't think was ever the case. The TI-84+CSE takes 20.6 seconds to fill the screen with 165 horizontal lines. The TI-84+SE takes 2.9 seconds to fill the screen with 64 horizontals. The area ratio is 43725/6144 pixels = 7.11, so pixel-for-pixel, and the speed ratio is 20.6/2.9 seconds = 7.09, so they're about the same speed, per pixel.

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2) Does RecallPic and StorePic work inside programs with archived pics?

Pics must be archived. There is no choice. Yes, you can use both commands in programs. Also, you'll be happy to know that because there's now a transparent color code, Pics can be recalled over others with (essentially) OR logic!

Of course you have to change the A values since text is larger, but I wonder how does that BASIC trick (as used in my screenshot above) behave on the 84+ C Silver Edition? And does it behave differently depending of what color you are using (knowing that white text has a gray background, for example)?

Thanks in advance.

It totally overwrites what's underneath. However, since the Hs and Ls are each about 16px tall or so, I can see that there are no pixels erased above the top of the H (and L) characters when they are drawn. Even with Pic variables, it appears the background of dark colors is *white*, not transparent, which is disappointing.

Darn that sucks. I am fearing that many BASIC games will have to rely on ASCII graphics and very simple menus in order to be playable.

Good to hear about the RecallPic commands, however. This means that BASIC programmers has over 210 KB of extra memory to store data (that they access with Pxl-Test) if they don't mind having a weird-looking picture filled with junk appearing randomly every now and then. (I'm thinking for example about enemy data in an RPG)

As for dual layer ASCII this sucks as well, although I guess it might be expected since white is no longer transparent in pictures. Now that you mention the top and bottom not being erased by text, however, I assume that this means that text sprites could be used? (Although most likely very slow >.<)

There will definitively be a need for ASM libraries to display tilemaps, rectangles and to change the text background color.

Darn that sucks. I am fearing that many BASIC games will have to rely on ASCII graphics and very simple menus in order to be playable.

I fear the same.

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Good to hear about the RecallPic commands, however. This means that BASIC programmers has over 210 KB of extra memory to store data (that they access with Pxl-Test) if they don't mind having a weird-looking picture filled with junk appearing randomly every now and then. (I'm thinking for example about enemy data in an RPG)

Don't forget that it takes a CPU and Flash toll (and Garbage Collect risk) to store those pictures back out again, though, and that RecallPic isn't exactly fast either. You'd want to use that for big block reads and writes. You'd probably also want something going on in half the screen to keep the player entertained during that process.

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As for dual layer ASCII this sucks as well, although I guess it might be expected since white is no longer transparent in pictures. Now that you mention the top and bottom not being erased by text, however, I assume that this means that text sprites could be used? (Although most likely very slow >.<)

There will definitively be a need for ASM libraries to display tilemaps, rectangles and to change the text background color.

Yeah, for pictures, my idea was to just store data inside them (basically each pixel would represent a digit, value or something else) in a certain layout, so that later they can be accessed by a game.

Since Pxl-test() doesn't detect colors (they all return 1), here is an idea of what I meant:

And if, somehow, pxl-test only returns 0 if a pixel is transparent, then the solution would be to setup a background image before starting editing data inside your picture, so that you can make sure that there are no white pixel hidden all over the place.

With such method you could store signifiant amounts of enemy (LV, HP, the ASCII characters used for their look, along with their height/width), boss, characters starting stats, possible obtainable items (and their effects, flags, etc), possible magic spells, and a lot more.

Routines would be written to decompress the data into temporary lists/matrices whenever needed.

This wouldn't be efficient, size-wise, especially if the picture isn't filled completely, but it would definitively be a workaround against the low 21 KB of RAM and prevent constant archiving/unarchiving of lists/matrices. Of course if someone decides to make an ASCII monochrome home screen game, then he can leave the picture intact on the graph screen during the entire gameplay.

Thanks for sharing Kerm. From a programming standpoint I am very disappointed. I expected this calculator to be better designed to support such a high resolution full color display (from a calculator standpoint). It boggles my mind why TI didn't use a better processor. Heck, even an ez80 would have been a dream. I was very much anticipating getting one of these. Now I think it's extremely unlikely.

It seems like (if I'm not missing anything) they really should have allowed StorePic and RecallPic to operate on rectangular portions of the image like on the 68K calculators—that would have allowed some level of tilemapping and perhaps have been somewhat faster than having to save/recall the entire screen at once (and pics of smaller regions would be much smaller, possibly enough that they could have been kept in RAM).

Not even being able to read color codes with Pxl-test also sounds very crummy! What's with that?

Since Pxl-test() doesn't detect colors (they all return 1), here is an idea of what I meant:

Congratulations, you just invented arithmetic coding?
The most efficient full-range encoding of values here would of course be binary (maximum representable value: 255). What you've specified there has giant 'holes' of values that can't be represented.

Thanks for sharing Kerm. From a programming standpoint I am very disappointed. I expected this calculator to be better designed to support such a high resolution full color display (from a calculator standpoint). It boggles my mind why TI didn't use a better processor. Heck, even an ez80 would have been a dream. I was very much anticipating getting one of these. Now I think it's extremely unlikely.

You're welcome, Art_of_camelot, hope you enjoyed the read. Let me know if you have any other questions. I think quite a few coders share your disappointment, while others are taking these developments as a challenge.

GinDiamond wrote:

So will TI update the old 2.55MP OS to have the same math features as the CSE one?

I find it unlikely.

Travis wrote:

It seems like (if I'm not missing anything) they really should have allowed StorePic and RecallPic to operate on rectangular portions of the image like on the 68K calculators—that would have allowed some level of tilemapping and perhaps have been somewhat faster than having to save/recall the entire screen at once (and pics of smaller regions would be much smaller, possibly enough that they could have been kept in RAM).

Well, there's an opportunity for everyone's favorite shell to offer more handy libraries for BASIC coders, I guess.

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Not even being able to read color codes with Pxl-test also sounds very crummy! What's with that?

I just tested, and you're exactly right about that. :/ How did you know?

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